Everything but the Truth

by Gillian McAllister

  Five hours of Jack. There could be no better prescription.

  We were in Oban, Jack’s tiny Scottish hometown, late on Friday night, ready for the rugby on the Saturday. Our visits had become less like visits and more like slices of living there: gone were the meals out and the country walks, replaced slowly by more mundane tasks – Jack sorting through his old school books in the loft, me leaving a toothbrush behind.

  It was almost always misty in Oban. The boats in the harbour looked half formed; only their hulls were visible, their masts disappearing up into the white air. Pieces of cloud seemed to hang, suspended, above Jack’s parents’ house, as if they had been ripped off from the main clouds and planted there instead.

  His old rugby team was having a commemorative match, for a friend of theirs whose neck was too damaged for him to play any more. I didn’t watch the match. Jack had told me not to bother. ‘Come after 7 p.m.,’ he’d said, ‘when the match will have ended and the festivities have begun.’

  I went shopping alone, instead, fingering the Babygros and the tiny socks in Mothercare, and turned up at the club after it had finished. Jack had sent me a long text about how to get in, which had made me smile. He was a writer, and text was his medium.

  When you get to the club park at the front, to the left of the row of oak trees, then come around and go into the white side door – not the navy-blue one. That will take you past the changing rooms and into the excitement of the makeshift bar area. Look for me; I am tall, dark and incredibly handsome xx

  I stood outside for a good ten minutes. I should have gone straight in, but I was too nervous. I was having a baby with Jack, but somehow meeting his friends felt scarier. And that was partly due to how long it had taken. Literally months. Not a single friend met. Countless visits to Oban but the friends were always busy.

  And so I had stopped asking, not out of fear, but because it had become embarrassing. Yet there I was, about to meet them.

  The rugby club consisted of a floodlit pitch and a run-down white wooden clubhouse. Autumn mists swirled in front of the floodlights and steam puffed out from the heaters on the veranda. There were at least fifty people there, I realized, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. They were standing, drinking, smoking, looking out over the grass.

  ‘Hello?’ Jack’s voice called out into the gloom as I was hovering outside the white door, one gloved hand on the handle.

  ‘Hi,’ I said to him.

  He emerged, smelling freshly showered, his hair damp, his lips on mine suddenly hot in the cold air. A cheer broke out on the veranda and he smiled at me, an arm firmly around my shoulders. His hand was moving. It always was, the fingers rubbing gently across my coat, the other hand stroking up and down my lower back. I loved that.

  ‘Come and meet everyone,’ he said. He led me up four rickety steps and on to the balcony. It smelt like the end of summer: mown lawns and grass drying out in the heat. Spilt cider and cigarettes. It reminded me of summers before; when Kate, my sister, and I were free to roam on our bikes.

  ‘JD,’ a stocky, blond man said. ‘We finally meet the lady.’

  I felt Jack stiffen next to me. ‘Rach, this is Pricey,’ he said. He gestured towards both of us, and Pricey shook my hand. ‘Pricey: this is Rachel.’

  My name was imbued with pride and significance. Pricey’s eyes crinkled at the corners.

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ he said.

  And maybe that was a thing everybody said, but I didn’t think so. Jack slung his arm over my shoulders. I liked the warm weight of it, and I smiled to myself. That meaningful introduction. This is Rachel.

  ‘Come to the bar?’ Jack said.

  I looked out at the rugby pitch, at the mild, early October evening that would soon be replaced with the endless cold and rain and snow of winter. ‘I’ll have a lemonade,’ I said. ‘Wild.’

  I’d enjoyed a glass of wine, before Jack, and before Wally. But Jack didn’t drink and I couldn’t drink, so we found ourselves doing other things: where previously my summer would have been spent in beer gardens, this one had been spent bowling, playing minigolf, on evening walks. It had been heady, that summer.

  ‘Come,’ Jack said.

  It was only really then that I registered what Pricey had called Jack. I paused, then said, ‘JD?’ to Pricey. I couldn’t work it out. He was called Jack Ross – no middle name. ‘Why not JR?’

  ‘It was my drink of choice,’ Jack explained.

  Pricey looked at him, then got clapped on the back by somebody else, and turned away from us. Jack pointed to the bar, and I walked over to it. And all the way there, he was right behind me, his hips against my back. Somebody spilt a drop of cold beer on my hand on the way.

  When we got to the bar, I turned to Jack. ‘But you don’t drink,’ I said, ‘JD.’

  ‘I said was,’ he replied. ‘I used to drink. Quite a bit.’ He looked at me. ‘I was a liability. A total bloody lightweight idiot.’

  I stepped closer to him. Getting to know somebody in those early days was like looking around a beautiful English garden: I wanted to find the next bit, the next pathway leading to the next surprise. I could never get enough. I didn’t say that, though.

  ‘Did you? Drink lots?’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine that.’

  ‘Yep. I’ve got a cat now, though,’ he said, pulling me towards him. ‘Got to think of him.’

  My mouth twisted into a smile. We were fond of pretending the cat was Jack’s offspring. We’d praise him for sleeping through. We’d pretend we were rushing to drop him at nursery. It was another one of our things: our many, many things we joked about.

  ‘Think of the habits he’d pick up if he saw his daddy drinking,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. He’d be hitting the bottle before he’s a teen.’ He grinned at me, leaning back against the bar. His hands were pink, cold-looking, even though it was warm. He kissed me, until two other men joined us.

  They spoke with plummy accents, like so many of the doctors I had worked with over the years. I always found their body language to be different, these people. It seemed to say I belong here, wherever they were.

  ‘I’m Roger,’ one of the men waiting beside us said to me. He was tall and had an enormous neck. The other, Ian, introduced himself, and then there was an awkward pause.

  ‘Roger’s a classic alpha male,’ Jack said to me.

  ‘Surely not,’ I said. Jack was tall, and broader than the others.

  ‘You’re a beta male, at heart, aren’t you?’ Roger said.

  Jack nodded, smiling sheepishly, and I loved him more than I had a moment before.

  ‘I’d be the shy, scared gorilla,’ Jack said. ‘The one all the others bully.’ He ducked his head, and they all laughed.

  ‘How long’ve you known JD?’ Ian said.

  ‘Oh, not long,’ I said. ‘We met in March.’

  ‘How long’ve we known him?’ Ian said to Roger. ‘Twenty years? Twenty-five? Saw him every week till he pissed off to Newcastle.’

  ‘It was the under nines, where we met,’ Roger said. ‘So twenty years. Jesus. I still think I’m twenty-one.’

  ‘Under nines. Sounds serious,’ I said.

  ‘What was your thing?’ Jack said to me. He was often asking about me. He seemed – totally unselfconsciously – to want to know every aspect of my history.

  ‘St John’s Ambulance,’ I said to him with a grin. ‘Though they were too disorganized, and it annoyed me.’

  ‘You wanted to be running it?’ Jack said.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I did footie as well as rugby,’ Roger said.

  But Jack ignored him. He always followed my thread of conversation, so I felt like it was just us, alone together. I fizzed under his interested gaze.

  ‘So you went from that to medicine?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah – with a bit of doctors and nurses, too, with dolls,’ I said.

  He flashed me a quick smile, and nodded.

  ‘Come on, get the lady a dri
nk,’ Roger interjected.

  ‘I’ll have a lemonade,’ Jack said. He tilted his head back, a half-nod to the bar behind him.

  ‘Chivalry’s dead, eh?’ Roger said.

  Jack reluctantly turned away from us. And even though he was facing the bar, his elbows in his worn grey jumper resting on it, a ten-pound note between his fingers, he kept turning around and looking at us.

  ‘So when were the JD years?’ I said.

  Jack’s head whipped around, halfway through his order. ‘Lemonade,’ he said to us instead of the bartender, nonsensically.

  ‘The what?’ Roger said to me.

  ‘The JD years. The drinking.’

  Roger and his companion exchanged a glance, evidently confused, then looked back at me. Jack took a step away from the bar and appeared by my arm. He didn’t have our drinks. I glanced at him, confused, but he ignored me.

  The moment passed. But I didn’t miss the look he gave them, the look that wasn’t meant for me. It was part warning, part question. Eyebrows raised, eyes widened.

  I don’t know what made me do it, but I deliberately turned my body away, as if admiring the view of the clubhouse, but slid my eyes back to Jack. He made a gesture. I couldn’t see it fully, but I got the gist. He drew his hand across his throat: not a finger slitting motion, his whole hand. The meaning was clear: cut it. I turned back to look at him and frowned, letting him know I had seen, but his expression was blank, his eyes as warm and affectionate as ever.

  ‘Where are the drinks?’ I said.

  ‘Coming up,’ Jack said easily. That laid-back tone didn’t fit with his facial expression, like a curdled cake mixture beginning to separate.

  I excused myself for a minute, feigning my phone ringing, and escaped to stand behind my car.

  What was that? I was suddenly desperate to be on my own; or rather, I wanted to speak to someone who knew me.

  The grass was spongy underfoot. Mushrooms were sprouting up out of the undergrowth. I could see the floodlights, the mist, and a crowd of silhouettes on the balcony, the occasional orange glowing orb arcing in the night to smokers’ mouths and back again, the funnels of smoke they blew out afterwards.

  My hand went to my belly again. It wasn’t a calm, maternal touch. It was grasping. This baby. This man I hardly knew.

  I needed to speak to Audrey, my best friend. We had grown up together, gone to the same university, like losers, we said. And then she met my friend Amrit, who was studying midwifery. I hardly saw him now.

  I dialled her number. ‘I’m being weird,’ I said when she answered. I heard her mute The X Factor and tell Amrit it was me.

  ‘Hi, big boy,’ she said; a long-standing nickname we used. The day she got a mortgage with Amrit, she told me she was a grown-up and we, at exactly the same time, said, ‘We’re big boys now.’ It was one of those serendipitous moments that come to define a friendship.

  ‘I’m being weird,’ I said again. I took a step forward. My hips ached. It was just the ligaments stretching, adjusting to the pregnancy, but I couldn’t take ibuprofen. There seemed to be so much I couldn’t do.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m outside the rugby club. In Oban.’ I tilted my head back, trying to calm down. I tried to look at the Scottish sky, still pale blue at this hour in October – the beautiful white nights – but it stung my eyes and I closed them. Mum’s face flashed through my mind in the momentary darkness, as it often did. I wondered where she was.

  ‘Oh yeah, of course. How’s it going?’

  ‘Really weird.’

  ‘Him or you?’

  ‘Him. His friends. They call him something else here. JD.’

  ‘JD? Why?’

  ‘He said it used to be his drink of choice.’

  ‘So? Are you alright?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m just … I don’t know.’

  Audrey hesitated. I could hear it, like seeing a typing sign on my iPhone that disappeared and reappeared as its sender drafted and redrafted. ‘Maybe this is … pregnancy stuff,’ she suggested. ‘You said yourself you’re not sleeping well. Crying at Andrex adverts. I don’t want to be a horrible sexist, but …’

  I kicked a conker across the grass. A couple got into their car nearby and their headlights swept across me as they left. ‘I dunno,’ I said after a few seconds. ‘When he was at the bar, I asked them about when he used to drink it and it was … there was a weird atmosphere. They looked odd.’ I perched on the bonnet of my car, still warm from when I’d driven over here so full of hope fifteen minutes ago.

  ‘What did they say?’ Audrey’s voice sounded distracted, quieter.

  ‘Nothing. They just didn’t get it,’ I said.

  My voice sounded strangled. That got her attention. I wasn’t making a chatty call, having popped outside just to catch up.

  ‘Rachel. Tell me. What’s up?’

  ‘I just feel like one day my baby might ask me something about its father and I’ll have no idea. None –’ My voice caught on the last word.

  I didn’t even tell her the rest: the things I mourned late at night. The excitement of trying for a baby on honeymoon; the approval an engagement after a few years of dating would’ve brought. Not this stuff. The raised eyebrows. The knowing it was an accident; that people might think not planned would mean not wanted.

  ‘Oh, no, don’t think that,’ Audrey said. ‘Babies take nine months to cook, to give you time to prepare. You’ll know Jack really well soon. Especially by the time Wally can talk.’

  ‘It was just … he made this signal.’ I found myself making it there, in the car park, my hand drifting up to my neck and lingering on it. I rearranged my hair and shivered, a branch cracking under my feet as I took a step towards the club. ‘Like he was telling them to shut up.’

  ‘Really?’

  I closed my eyes against the night air. I opened them again and looked at the sky. I was only a couple of hundred miles from home, but it felt like a million. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I could hear the scepticism in her voice.

  We’d been here before. Right after Mum. With Ben.

  I thought back to the gesture Jack had made. I was so certain … and yet. Could I really see him doing it? Maybe he was adjusting his jumper. He thought it didn’t fit him; had lamented he looked like a dickhead when he appeared in a photo on Facebook wearing it. Maybe he didn’t hear. Maybe he wasn’t bothered. Perhaps I was … perhaps it was grief. Perhaps I was going mad.

  ‘I bet he wasn’t. As if he’d do that in front of you. He’s such a … gent,’ Audrey said. ‘Maybe it’s just like the stuff with Ben.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I murmured.

  She had known my ex-boyfriend, Ben, so well. She was the only person who knew what really happened; who understood the nuances. That, eventually, my accusations had driven him away, but that there was more to it than that. That perhaps it had been for the best, anyway; that we hadn’t been crazily in love, not really. That he was more of a security blanket to me than a boyfriend. She didn’t know Jack at all.

  ‘The paranoia,’ I said.

  ‘That old chestnut.’ I could hear her relaxing again. ‘It’s exactly the same. Fear that someone’s not who they say they are. But it’s not real.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t make a gesture like that right in front of you. Want to speak to Am?’ she added. Her tone was hopeful.

  He missed me, too, I thought. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  After we said goodbye I went back and stood next to Jack, his warm arm around my waist, his leg touching mine all the way down. The atmosphere was still tense. It was nothing concrete. Nothing tangible. Or rather, it was lots of small things, added together: the silence as I arrived back, not comfortable and conversational but abrupt and sudden, like someone had pressed ‘mute’ in the middle of a story. An exchanged glance between two of Jack’s friends. Pricey clearing his throat.

  ‘Something I s
aid?’ I joked, but my voice sounded tinny and flat.

  ‘No, no,’ Jack said, smiling at me.

  Conversation resumed. Or actually, it seemed to me, it started over – one of Jack’s friends talking about his girlfriend’s new dog – and the air soon felt different again; sociable and loving and warm. Though that only reminded me of how it had felt a few minutes before: not hostile, exactly. But as if something had been hiding behind a curtain, hoping it wouldn’t be revealed.

  I turned to Pricey, wanting to start our own conversation.

  ‘What was that … what was that JD stuff all about?’ I said.

  I saw his reaction before he could hide it. A flash of the whites of his eyes, his brows shooting up. Shock.

  ‘All what stuff?’ he said.

  ‘You know – he went all weird … when you called him JD. And then when I asked.’

  I could feel Jack’s gaze on me, but I avoided looking up. I probably only had a few seconds before he might interrupt, I thought.

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ Pricey said. He didn’t break eye contact. And then he looked away, raising his eyebrows. He thought me weird. Jack’s paranoid girlfriend.

  I’d imagined it all. I glanced up. Jack wasn’t looking at us, wasn’t paying any attention to us at all. I’d imagined that, too.

  We left at just gone half ten. Jack led me out the back way – amid many tongue-in-cheek comments – and past the changing rooms where he grabbed his bag, his arm flexing as he lifted it.

  ‘Alright,’ a tall man with an afro said from the corner of the changing room. He was standing with his kit bag over his shoulder, a lit-up phone in his hand.

  ‘Oh, we didn’t get a chance to see you,’ Jack said, releasing my hand from his. ‘This is Rachel. Rachel, this is Charlie.’

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said, reaching for me. ‘Masters. Nice to meet you.’

  It was one of those moments where I didn’t hear what he said until a few minutes later, and even then I didn’t register it until I was flicking the indicator to turn right out of the car park.